Ratcatcher (3 page)

*

He’d met Claire Stirling at a consulate bash when he was stationed in Marseille, and he’d immediately recognised her as SIS, like him at the time. The service disapproved of office relationships but with discretion Purkiss and Claire managed it. They were spies, after all. After a few months they were engaged.

A field agent of five years’ standing, Purkiss’s work in Marseille involved the study of immigration patterns into the city from Middle Eastern countries and the application of closer scrutiny when anybody suspicious arrived. Someone, for instance, whose name had come up before in connection with a Service operation elsewhere. Claire’s work was to all appearances more humdrum, monitoring radio traffic between the various embassies. They both enjoyed their work, they socialised mainly with diplomatic staff, and they loved together passionately, the clandestine nature of their union adding to the thrill.

The change came with the death of Behrouz Asgari. An Iranian-born businessman who had made Marseille his home for the previous twenty years, he was also a philanthropist whose investment in local infrastructure had lifted thousands of residents out of slum tenements. Asgari was openly opposed to the incumbent American and British governments and a devout Shi’a Muslim. He’d been extensively investigated, of course – Purkiss had done a lot of the work himself – and came up clean, with no links to hostile activity against the West.

One evening, while Asgari had been strolling along the waterfront with his wife, a lone motorcyclist had ridden up and shot him dead. The hit was a professional one, a double tap to the head using modified hollow-point nine-millimetre rounds. Asgari had been a personable, well-liked man, but he had business rivals aplenty, and the police investigation, such as it was, concluded that some unnamed competitor was responsible.

Two weeks after the murder, Claire had come round one evening to Purkiss’s flat – circumstances dictated that they live separately – in an odd mood, silent and brooding. He’d gone easy, coaxing gently but knowing when to back off. At last over a glass of Beaujolais she’d told him. For the last six months she had been investigating her immediate superior, Donal Fallon, for corruption. She suspected he was the person who’d carried out the hit on Asgari.

Fallon was a legend, an Anglo-Irish agent only half a decade older than Purkiss and Claire but a veteran of numerous high-intensity arenas, including Islamabad and Damascus. Purkiss had met Fallon many times through Claire, had been impressed by the man’s wit, his intellectual nimbleness, had liked his obvious gentleness and his affection for Claire. The three of them had become a trio, Fallon conniving at their affair with a twinkle. 

Slowly, Claire had begun to detect irregularities in his working patterns, in what he did with the information she supplied him. She had started to pay closer attention, working off her own bat, relaying her suspicions to nobody. She amassed circumstantial evidence, unexpected blips in Fallon’s bank account, little more, and she was about to give up the search when Fallon asked her to post surveillance on Asgari without giving her a satisfactory explanation. He’d received without comment the intelligence she gathered for him, though she sensed he was looking for connections to radical Islamist groups, the kind of thing Purkiss himself had investigated.

Then the hit took place, at a time when Fallon was allegedly on a solitary hiking holiday in the Scottish Highlands.

‘It wasn’t business related. It was political.’ Purkiss had let her talk without interruption, the flow becoming a surge under the influence of the wine and of her agitation. ‘Fallon saw Asgari as a potential threat to us, couldn’t pin anything on him, and decided to take him out pre-emptively.’

She fell silent and he said, ‘A one-man death squad.’

There’d been rumours, for at least as long as he’d been with the Service, but most people considered them to be urban legends.

She looked straight at him for the first time. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know if it’s just one man.’

He understood then why she’d kept her fears to herself, why she hadn’t taken her suspicions over Fallon’s head the moment she’d been sure. If there were others working with him, they might be senior to her.

They talked past the dawn. Purkiss wanted her to back off, thought she was in far too deeply. Claire countered that she had come too far to quit. Besides, she was certain Fallon didn’t know she was on to him. They reached a compromise. Purkiss would take over the active role, surveilling Fallon. Claire would provide logistical support. They would involve nobody else for the time being.

Two evenings later Purkiss let himself into Claire’s flat, arms laden with groceries for their meal. In the second before he was able to react, he saw Claire arched backwards, her feet off the floor, Fallon behind her with an arm across her throat and a knee in her lower back.

Purkiss yelled, the primal roar of a berserker, and covered the distance between them even as Claire dropped away, dead weight. Fallon met Purkiss with a speed and grace Purkiss would have marvelled at under other circumstances, a kick to the face, another to the knee, felling him. Purkiss clawed at his foot and almost got a hold, but Fallon was at the door and was gone.

There was no question of going after him, of leaving her. Purkiss crouched with Claire’s head between his palms and her lifeless, bruised eyes staring past him. He gave vent to a stream of nonsense words he could no longer remember. Later he recalled begging the paramedic to keep trying to revive her, not to let her down as he, Purkiss, had let her down by not overriding her decision to keep after Fallon, by not being there with her when Fallon paid a visit, by being so
stupid
as not to realise Fallon, the master spy, would have noticed he was under scrutiny.

Purkiss wasn’t a believer in the idea of repressed emotions, the notion that feelings could actually exist as entities in their own right, simmering under the surface whether or not you were aware of them. But, fists white on the wheel, he understood the appeal of the concept. The fury, the anguish, had returned to him now in so whole and so familiar a form that it was easy to believe they’d never gone away. 

Purkiss had missed the opportunity to mete out his own punishment to Fallon at the site of Claire’s murder. Although there would have been ways to get at him after his imprisonment – there were always ways, even in an environment as hermetic as Belmarsh – Purkiss had found the idea of cold revenge wearying, depressing even. Now, though, if there was any substance to the intelligence Vale had forwarded to him, any possibility at all that Fallon was on the loose –

This time
, he thought,
you don’t get away
.

THREE

Vale’s overcoat shrouded his tall, rawboned frame like a cloak against the autumn chill. He was a black man in his sixties with salted hair and the beginnings of a stoop. Under the roving of his yellow eyes, Purkiss felt as though he were being measured for a coffin. Vale raised a thumb and fingertips to his lips and drew on his cigarette and from his nostrils blew scythes of smoke.

With two movements of his head – a nod and a tilt – he conveyed a greeting and a request to walk. They headed across the lawn to the graveyard.

‘Hoggart pose any problems?’ Vale had a habit of speaking in a virtual monotone which led people to assume he was on some kind of medication.

‘No. He’s small fry. It’s the end of him.’

‘Clean job?’ He meant had Purkiss been discreet, left any traces of himself.

‘The Rijeka police have me on camera with Spiljak. That’s about it. No names.’

Vale nodded again. He stopped at an ancient gravestone and scuffed at the moss with his toe, crouching to peer at what was carved underneath. It wasn’t his way to look someone in the face when delivering difficult information.

‘The photo was taken yesterday morning in Tallinn, Estonia, by a contact of mine who lives in the city and who spotted Fallon in a market square. I called him, of course. He said he’d tried to follow Fallon but lost him.’ He glanced up at Purkiss. ‘He had no doubt it was him, even if you think that picture might have caught a lookalike.’

‘How?’ Purkiss meant,
how was it possible? Fallon, outside?

Vale straightened. ‘I rang the Home Office, got stonewalled. Tried Little Sister, same there. Eventually a friend in Big Sister came through.’

Little and Big Sisters were respectively SIS and the Security Service, or Six and Five. The adjectives referred to the sizes of their personnel lists.

‘And?’ Vale had started walking again and Purkiss kept pace.

‘Donal Fallon was released from prison on February eighteenth last year.’

‘Hang on.’ Purkiss stopped, Vale turning to face him. ‘Released?’

‘Yes, it would seem so. I’m waiting for more details but it could only have been an amnesty granted by the Home Secretary.’

Disorientation set in. Purkiss had been expecting a narrative about an audacious escape from Belmarsh and an embarrassed cover up. Not this.

‘He’d served two years.’

‘Slightly less than.’

‘The
tariff
was ten years.’

‘I know.’

Purkiss fought the urge to gabble. ‘For God’s sake, Quentin.’

‘It turns the stomach, doesn’t it.’ Vale paced. ‘And it gets worse. Once I’d established that he’d been released, I went back to my Little Sister contacts and confronted them. Lots of awkward coughs and shuffling of feet, and they admitted that Fallon had started working for them again. A brilliant agent, guilty of a terrible crime but given a last shot at redemption, so forth. Then, after a fortnight, he vanished.’

‘Vanished.’

‘Before he’d even been briefed on his new mission. Took off without trace. They pulled out all the stops to find him, at first, but after a while they gave up. He was too good an agent to let himself be found, and chances were they’d never hear from him again. Better to avoid a scandal, put the whole sorry matter to bed.’

Purkiss walked away from Vale, making his way rapidly between the headstones. The hills, the grey sweep of the sky didn’t seem vast enough to contain what he was experiencing within. His jaw muscles felt locked.

In time he walked back. Vale hadn’t moved, had had the good grace not to watch him.

‘Who’s your contact in Tallinn?’

‘A former Service chap, Estonian but one of us. Jaak Seppo. I’ve known him ten years. He does a bit of freelance work for me now and then, keeps me in the picture.’ Vale thumbed his phone. ‘I’m texting you his number and address. I’ve already told him you’re coming.’

A connection fired in Purkiss’s mind. ‘Tallinn.’

Vale gave a faint nod. ‘Yes. Quite.’

‘When is it happening, again?’

‘October the thirteenth. The day after tomorrow.’

‘You think Fallon’s got something planned?’

Vale fired up another cigarette. ‘I know precisely as much as you do. But… I have a feeling.’

*

Abby’s office, or “command centre” as she was pleased to call it, was a basement flat in Whitechapel which had been converted into one large room with a kitchenette, miniature bathroom and shower and fold-out bed. Two L-shaped desks dominated the floor, straining under an assortment of desktop computers, laptops, printers and scanners in various states of physical integrity. A gigantic plasma screen television had conquered one wall and was tuned to a news channel Purkiss didn’t recognise. A pile of lesser TV sets in the corner displayed a cornucopia of what Purkiss assumed was real-time footage of mundane scenes: empty streets, the interior of a shopping centre, a busy motorway.

She had met him at the door with a screwdriver in one hand and a motherboard in the other, dark and untidy, a tiny pixie with a wild mess of hair.

‘Hi, boss.’ Her accent was broad Lancashire, unleavened after five years in London.

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It makes me feel old.’

‘You are old, Mr Purkiss, sir.’ She stood aside for him. ‘You’ve shaved off the goatee. Pity. I rather liked it.’

He declined her offer of tea – there’d been semi-dried paint in the mug once before – and dumped a sprawl of papers on the floor to make some room on one of the armchairs. Purkiss nodded at the pile of TV screens. ‘That looks a bit dodgy, legally speaking.’

‘Testing out some new surveillance gear. For professional use only.’ She gazed at the images, rapt. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it? The resolution.’

‘I won’t ask where you got this stuff.’

‘Best not, no.’

He employed Abby as both researcher and technological wizard. She had done the background work for Purkiss on the Rijeka case, tracking down Hoggart’s address, rooting out the intelligence on Spiljak and his crew, even producing false credentials for Purkiss which were accurate down to the minutest detail. One of the things she did was generate a constant supply of fake passports for use at short notice.

She handed him a couple and he studied them, marvelling. They even smelled used. He chose a British identity: Martin Hughes. In the picture he was clean shaven, slightly amused looking.
Affable
was the word he’d most often heard used to describe his features. Even Claire had used it, among many others besides.